Tell Her A Story

Whether The Role Is Haughty Or Bawdy, Dame Judi Dench Will Take It On If She Thinks The Experience Will Be A Laugh.

January 8, 2006|By Evan Henerson Los Angeles Daily News

Rules to live by when attempting to entice Judi Dench into your cast:

Don't bring a script. Dench won't read it.

Promise her an experience of much laughter no matter how grim the subject might be. No fun means no sale.

Sell the director, the writer and the cast Dench will join. If it's a play, all the better, because despite her multiple awards (including an Oscar for Shakespeare in Love,) Dench insists that she is, first and foremost, a creature of the stage.

But above all, approach Judi Dench with a good tale.

"Tell me a story," says Dench, who stars in Mrs. Henderson Presents, opening Jan. 20 in South Florida. "I find that irresistible. That, after all, is the end result: There's the author, and then, sieving it, is the director and the actors bringing it to the audience.

"The thing about not reading scripts and my wanting a director to tell me a story is a risk I need to take. I need that real fear. It's like going nearer and nearer to the edge of something. I don't like reading scripts very much. I like it better for someone to just explain to me what it is about this story."

It was fellow Brit Bob Hoskins -- wearing the hat of both co-star and executive producer -- who brought Dench the tale of Laura Henderson and the nude revues of Britain's Windmill Theatre in wartime England. Hoskins figured -- correctly, as it turned out -- that the lure of getting to dress up in disguise as a Chinese servant and in a polar bear costume would sweeten the deal.

"I thought she wouldn't be able to resist that," recalls Hoskins. "I looked at the material and thought, if we can get Judi Dench, we've got a really good film here."

An effective eccentric

The fact that Henderson was the under-the-radar celebrity behind the Windmill's success was a draw as well. Every bit an eccentric, the widowed and wealthy Henderson bought the Windmill and revived 'round-the-clock revue-style vaudeville acts. Once the performances were copied by rival theaters and Windmill ticket sales started to slip, Henderson borrowed a page from Paris' Moulin Rouge entertainment, getting her tableaux girls to perform nude and persuading the Lord Chamberlain -- who censored all dramatic works -- that the motionless nudes were comparable to works of art.

"The Lord Chamberlain was censoring scripts when I first came into the theater," says Dench, whose stage career began in 1957. "[Laura Henderson's nude revue] was kind of a one-off. Nobody else got that done. I love the fact that, from the moment he opens the door for her, you know she's going to get her own way, to some extent, if not all. Scheming, impossible. All those things, really. It's kind of a gift."

Henderson enjoyed a love-hate relationship with Vivian Van Damm (Hoskins), who she hired to run the Windmill. Banned from the theater, she would wear disguises to sneak in and look after the welfare of the performers. Even amid the din of air-raid sirens, the Windmill was the one theater in London that remained open throughout the war.

"It's a story worth telling," says Dench. "It's very courageous and anti-war, I think."

More plays coming

Dench, 71, who lives outside of London, recently completed the film Notes on a Scandal with Cate Blanchett, and she'll reprise her role as spy boss M for the latest James Bond film, Casino Royale. She also appears in Joe Wright's remake of Pride & Prejudice as the imperious dowager Lady Catherine de Bourgh.

Next up will be a couple of plays: Noel Coward's Hay Fever for director Peter Hall, to be staged in London, and a role in a musical version of The Merry Wives of Windsor as part of the Royal Shakespeare Company's year-long, "Complete Works" staging of the entire Shakespeare canon.

While she'll congenially discuss Mrs. Henderson, Bond or the cinematic liaisons she still hopes to bring about (including a wish list that includes working with director Martin Scorsese and actor Ed Harris), you quickly get the idea that Dench much prefers being in front of an audience to being in front of a camera.

This despite the fact that her accolades include four Oscar nominations, nine British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) awards, a Golden Globe and an Emmy nomination.

"When she was young -- and this may be an ungenerous thing to say -- she always seemed slightly uncomfortable in films," says Henderson director Stephen Frears. "Somebody said she was too raw and she was such a woman of the theater that it always slightly showed in the films. I may be talking nonsense, but I'd like to think she sort of gave up on films, and of course became wonderful at that moment."

Dench, who was passed over for a potentially career-altering role in Tony Richardson's A Taste of Honey in the 1960s, recalls being told that she would never make films. "I don't remember who said it, but I just remember the remark," she says. "Do I remember the remark."